Downfall

The end of a West African dictatorship.

Moussa Dadis Camara at his headquarters, a few weeks before the attempt on his life.Credit Photograph by Tim Hetherington

On the morning of September 28, 2009, in Conakry, the capital of the West African republic of Guinea, tens of thousands of people marched to the national soccer stadium to demonstrate against the nation’s ruling military junta. At first, the atmosphere in the stadium was like a carnival, with singing, dancing, chants for freedom and democracy. People shouted, “Long live the nation! End military rule!” At one point, scores of protesters knelt together on the playing field to pray.

The focus of the protest was Moussa Dadis Camara, a formerly obscure Army captain who had seized power in Guinea nine months earlier, hours after the previous leader died of illness and old age. Dadis had promised to step aside for elections, once he had had the chance to “cleanse the nation.” It soon became clear, though, that he was intent on creating a military dictatorship. Dadis billboards began appearing in the streets of Conakry, and so did Dadis wristwatches and T-shirts; Guinean musicians composed odes to his greatness. More worrying, Dadis was prone to violent mood swings, and he surrounded himself with a forbidding posse of armed young men, the Presidential guards, also called the Red Berets. In August, Dadis announced that elections would be held in January, 2010, and added that any members of the ruling junta should feel free to run “if they so desire.” The opposition decided to act. In the days before September 28th, the anniversary of Guinea’s independence from France, leaders of a coalition of political parties and trade unions called the Forces Vives summoned their followers to demonstrate.

After the joyous beginning, the rally at the stadium turned violent. At around eleven-thirty, after the mass prayer, soldiers fired tear gas at a crowd of demonstrators outside, and a cloud of it drifted into the stadium, causing a panicked stampede. Hundreds of Red Berets, special-forces gendarmes, and plainclothes vigilantes loyal to Dadis suddenly appeared at the stadium exits, and some of them opened fire into the crowd with automatic weapons. Others began murdering innocents with machetes. For well over an hour, Dadis’s men moved through the crowd, hacking, shooting, and beating to death at least a hundred and fifty-six people. They also stripped and gang-raped more than a hundred women, using bayonets, shoes, pieces of wood, and gun barrels. One victim who survived watched in terror as soldiers murdered a girl who lay on the ground next to her by sticking a Kalashnikov into her vagina and pulling the trigger.

Guinea has never known democracy. Conakry was evacuated angrily by the French colonial administrators on September 28, 1958, days after a referendum in which Guineans voted in favor of independence. The first postcolonial President, Ahmed Sékou Touré, installed a Marxist dictatorship that cut Guinea off from the West and from most of its neighbors. After Touré died, in 1984, the Army chief of staff, Lansana Conté, seized power. Conté ended Guinea’s isolation and reopened the country to foreign investment, but he kept a firm grip on power through the Army. For a quarter century, he did little else.

Guinea, which has a population of ten and a half million people, is one of Africa’s least developed nations, but it is rich in minerals, with the world’s largest reserves of bauxite. It is also strategically placed in West Africa, bordering Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, all of which have had civil wars in the past twenty years. Lansana Conté interfered in their conflicts—even backing Liberian rebel groups—but mostly managed to keep Guinea from being sucked in, or succumbing to ethnic warfare itself. In recent years, however, Guinea has become a key transshipment point for drug traffickers. A U.N. report published in 2008 said that “at least fifty tons of cocaine from Latin America are entering West Africa every year, en route to Europe where the drug sells for almost US$2 billion on the streets.” The flow of money and the amount of official corruption that it had engendered in Guinea and its unstable neighbor Guinea-Bissau threatened to turn them into Africa’s first “narco-states.”

For Guineans, the immediate problem was the Army, which effectively ran the country. Under Conté, its poorly paid soldiers habitually preyed upon civilians for money and other favors, and mutinied bloodily over problems with their wages and benefits. During confrontations with protesters in June, 2006, and in January and February, 2007, they had killed at least a hundred and forty-five people. The massacre at the stadium in September was different, though; it was blatant, and the public sexual violence showed a new, brutal strategy.

Evidence of the massacre emerged quickly, in the form of cell-phone videos, photographs, and eyewitness testimony, and it provoked international denunciations of the Dadis regime. Dadis reacted with a series of defensive and contradictory statements. At first, he said that he had been unable to prevent the violence, because he was being held “hostage” by the Army, which was “out of control.” A few days later, he denied that the massacre had even occurred. Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, said he believed that Dadis had “participated in the decision-making” that led to the massacre, and called for international intervention. In response, Dadis suggested that France still harbored colonial ambitions in Guinea, and was plotting against him with Guinean opposition politicians.

Two days after the massacre, a French television reporter was shown into Dadis’s private chambers for an afternoon interview, only to find him in bed, where he remained throughout the conversation. The President, it emerged, stayed awake at night and slept during the day, like Nosferatu.

On October 5th, the U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, William Fitzgerald, flew into Conakry for a meeting with Dadis. Afterward, Fitzgerald told the press that the dictator was “lucid” but seemed oblivious of the outrage that the massacre had caused. Fitzgerald said that he had told Dadis to give up power. “In America’s view, Moussa Dadis Camara can’t be President,” he said, “and we are going to hold him to that.”

In short order, the United States and the Economic Community of West African States announced an arms embargo against Guinea, and then the U.S. and the African Union announced a package of sanctions, including a travel ban and a freeze on the assets of Dadis and some of his associates. Most of these measures were swiftly seconded by the European Union. Soon thereafter, Human Rights Watch issued a preliminary report, in which it concluded that the stadium attacks had been premeditated, and blamed President Dadis and several of his senior aides, who had led the units involved in the rapes and killings.

Reports began to leak out that Dadis was building a militia, recruited from his tribe, the Kpelle, and trained by foreign mercenaries. Africa analysts speculated anxiously about the potential for a civil war, and Fitzgerald said that a conflict in Guinea might “spill over the borders and reinfect Sierra Leone and Liberia.” The International Crisis Group suggested that a regional military intervention force might be required to remove Dadis from power.

Late last year, I flew to Guinea. By then, some of the senior officials in Dadis’s government seemed to understand the extent of their predicament, and they treated my visit as an opportunity to amend the record. President Dadis sent a black Chinese-built limousine to pick me up at the airport. The car was waiting for me on the tarmac at the foot of the steps as I left the plane. On the way to the hotel, the driver ignored the limo’s satellite-navigation display, with its Chinese-language instructions. Whenever he needed to clear traffic, he honked his horn until everyone got out of the way.

Conakry, built on a needle of land that juts into the Atlantic Ocean, is laid out on a Gallic colonial grid, with wide boulevards shaded by great drooping mango trees and a complex of colonnaded government buildings, all painted the same shade of cream. There are many more Guineans today than there were in 1958, and so the city’s European geometry is crowded with corrugated-tin-roofed shacks and market stalls, and there are people everywhere: schoolchildren in khaki-colored uniforms, boys in bright sports jerseys and flip-flops, women in wood-block-print dresses and wraps. Smoke rises from the city’s charcoal and kindling fires. Jeeps crammed with armed soldiers rush frequently through the streets, and civilians pretend not to notice them.

Guinea is a mainly Muslim country, and Conakry is dotted with mosques. These have a soft-edged quality to them: gingerbread houses made out of mud and painted in brown and white. At night, Conakry is dark. There is almost no electricity, and most automobile traffic ceases, so the city is quiet, except for the sound of crickets.

On my first day in Conakry, Guinea’s then foreign minister, Alexandre Cécé Loua, visited me at my hotel. We sat at a table outside, near the swimming pool. He promised to take me to see President Dadis the next day. “We need help,” he said. “The French have launched a negative campaign against us. Of course, we understand it is because of their economic interests. Guinea is very resource-rich. We have bauxite, gold, diamonds—and we have recently discovered uranium.” He looked at me, and said, “Yes.”

Dadis’s presence was everywhere in Conakry. One day, I found my driver listening to a rousing song on the car radio in praise of the President. The title was “So Far So Good,” and the lyrics went: “Sékou Touré ruled for twenty-six years and he allowed no betrayals; Moussa Dadis Camara allows no traitors.” In the offices of several junta members, I saw clocks bearing his image, including one that burst on the hour into a loud electronic chime of “Oh! Susannah.”

In his first months in office, Dadis had had his own television show, a combination of reality TV and public tribunal. Soon after taking power, he had begun a campaign against official involvement in the drug trade, which turned out to be much greater than anyone suspected. The late dictator’s son, Ousmane Conté, was arrested and, from his prison cell, in a recording shown on television, tearfully confessed that he had made deals with Colombian drug traffickers. Presidential guards had been used to unload drug cargoes from airplanes. Others who acknowledged their involvement included Conté’s brother-in-law and the former chiefs of Guinea’s intelligence agency and police force.

Dadis took to arresting government officials and military officers he suspected of corruption and interrogating them on live television. These appearances, on what became known as “The Dadis Show,” earned him an instant following. For the shows, he wore a form-fitting camouflage uniform, a red beret, and, frequently, oversized sunglasses. He presented himself as both judge and redeemer. In one memorable episode, he confronted Anatoly Patchenko, a representative of Rusal, Russia’s largest aluminum company, which had obtained a lucrative mining concession at a low price during the Conté years. Dadis accused him of being an “international crook.” Patchenko, an obese man in a tan tropical suit, looked shamefaced and terrified. After the show, he took refuge in the Russian Embassy, and soon fled the country. On another show, last June, Dadis humiliated the German ambassador, Karl Prinz, who had dared question him about his political intentions. To the shock and amusement of the studio audience, Dadis dressed down the ambassador, who stood uncomfortably in the audience for long minutes. At one point, Dadis shouted, “Don’t take me for your little boy. . . . You are speaking to a President.”

I first met President Dadis late at night, at Camp Alpha Yaya Diallo, the military compound where he was living. The camp is a kind of Guinean Fort Hood, a vast complex of military housing spread over a hillside on the southern edge of Conakry. Except for the absence of roadside-shanty shops, there is little noticeable difference between its interior and the rest of the city; soldiers and civilians move around on foot, and there are laundry lines and cook fires everywhere. A half mile or so in from the main entrance is the apartment block that was serving as Dadis’s Presidential palace, a series of flat-roofed three-story buildings made out of breeze blocks and painted light green, beige, and apricot. It reminded me of low-income housing projects I had seen in Florida.

The façade of Dadis’s building was hung with huge banners exalting him. One showed a map of Guinea with an open hand poised over it, and the words “Dadis President.” In front of the building was a large lot where pickup trucks and a number of jeeps and armored personnel carriers were parked. A couple of dozen Red Berets—tough-looking, muscular young men with weapons and unfriendly expressions—lounged around the entrance. When I was shown in, Dadis appeared distracted and barely mustered a hello. Then, with his mood alternating between moroseness and defiance, he embarked on a monologue that lasted for more than two hours.

Dadis is a small, hard-faced man with tiny eyes, a lantern jaw, and yellow-tinged skin. Before he joined the Army, he had studied law and economics. He received military training in Germany, and served with U.N. peacekeepers in Sierra Leone during the civil war there. His last position before he took power had been managing the Guinean Army’s fuel supplies. At our first meeting, he was barefoot, and sat in a high-backed black leather executive chair that dwarfed him. His desk was piled with folders and papers, remote controls, mobile phones, a Koran, a Bible, an inlaid-wood globe, and a porcelain Madonna with a rosary. (Dadis is a Christian in a country that is eighty-five per cent Muslim.) Around the room were several large, gilt-framed oil portraits of the President in heroic poses.

The conviction was growing in the international press that Dadis was responsible for the massacre and would have to relinquish his office. Scowling, he insisted to me that he was not to blame. “For fifty years, we’ve had an army that is unstructured and disorganized, and I have inherited this situation,” he said. “For nine months, I was fighting drugs on my own. I arrested former Prime Ministers, officials—even the son of the President!” He went on, shouting by now, “So why does the U.S. want to fight against me? What happened in New York City on 9/11? It was drugs and international terrorism!” His political opponents were mostly Muslim, and he claimed that they were not just narco-traffickers but also religious extremists. He produced a DVD and held it up in the air. “It shows that intégristes”—fundamentalists—“and Al Qaeda had weapons in the stadium on September 28th,” he said, and promised to give me a copy later. Al Qaeda provoked the stadium violence, he said, exploiting the fact that the Army was “disorganized—knowing that it would react.” The intégristes had opened fire, he said. “The police who were there asked for help. So a lot of soldiers went over there. A panic broke out. I wanted to go there, but the military people here begged me to stay. They said, ‘You are President, you must stay here. You cannot go to the field to intervene.’ So that’s what happened.”

During the massacre, Dadis’s Red Berets were led by his aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Aboubacar (Toumba) Diakité. In our conversation, Dadis suggested that Toumba had acted on his own authority. “When he heard that the military were going there, my A.D.C. followed the troops to the stadium,” he said. “The A.D.C. went there from here, but he did not receive orders from me.”

Dadis’s tribe, the Kpelle, represents less than five per cent of Guinea’s population. In the Army, he forged relationships with officers of the much larger Mandinka tribe. Toumba is a Mandinka, and so are Sékouba Konaté, the Vice-President and Secretary of Defense, and Moussa Tiegboro Camara, the chief of a special commando unit charged with fighting drugs and organized crime.

On the morning of September 28th, Dadis ordered Tiegboro to go and persuade the opposition leaders to call off their rally. Tiegboro was unsuccessful. At one point, his commandos fired on marchers as they gathered outside the stadium, reportedly killing several people. An hour or so later, with the rally under way, Toumba and the Red Berets burst into the stadium, firing their weapons into the crowd. Soon afterward, Toumba led his soldiers to the bleachers where the opposition leaders were sitting. There he oversaw the beating of several of the politicians. He then walked the leaders out of the stadium, past other Red Berets, who were gang-raping women.

Dadis argued that he had been lenient with the opposition, and that his soldiers’ response had been provoked. “When we heard that some of the leaders were wounded, I told my military to take them to the best clinics,” he said. “Yes, people died at the stadium, but it was not a peaceful march. The protesters broke into police stations and destroyed, and they stole weapons. O.K., the U.S. will make me leave, but after me comes intégristes, Al Qaeda, and a narco-trafficking government! They will miss an African like me afterward, because there will not be another like me.”

It seemed more likely that China would miss Dadis if he left office. Two weeks before I arrived, Guinea’s mining minister had announced a seven-billion-dollar deal with a Chinese consortium for exploration and extraction rights to a range of raw materials, in exchange for a new power plant, paved roads, and other development projects. According to diplomats and mining executives, the Chinese had placed a great deal of money—as much as two hundred million dollars—in Guinea’s central bank. When I asked Dadis about this, he gave me a noncommittal look and said that China was not the only country that wanted to do business. Iran, he said, was also interested in Guinea’s minerals, specifically in its uranium. In fact, he said, he had an offer on his desk from Iran to mine uranium—he waved a file in the air. All he had to do, he said, was to sign it.

About an hour into our meeting, someone began knocking insistently at the door. Finally, Dadis got up to answer it. He spoke cautiously through the door in a low voice and then unlocked it.

A large man in uniform, sweating and very agitated, barged into the room and looked around suspiciously. Dadis introduced him to me as General Sékouba Konaté. The General had been on a trip to the interior during the stadium massacre, and so his reputation was relatively untarnished. But his relationship with Dadis was complicated. I had read unconfirmed reports that, after Conté’s death, Dadis and Konaté had drawn straws for the Presidency; Dadis had won, and the two had agreed to some sort of power-sharing arrangement. It seemed obvious that they distrusted one another deeply. I exchanged polite words with Konaté, who nodded tersely, muttered, “No problem,” and walked out. Dadis locked the door behind him.

I suggested to Dadis that his aide-de-camp, Toumba, take me back to the stadium and show me what had “really happened.” Dadis said that this sounded like a good idea, and that he would arrange it. In the following days, when I asked Dadis’s aides about the proposed stadium visit, they politely ignored me. Dadis gave me a copy of the DVD with the proof of Al Qaeda’s presence in the stadium, but it didn’t work.

One morning, I went to a small city park to meet Lama Bangoura, a twenty-nine-year-old lawyer and a vice-president of the New Democratic Forces, led by Mouctar Diallo. Along with most of the other senior opposition leaders, Diallo himself was abroad, mustering support for regional pressure on Dadis. It was their influence, in part, that had encouraged the sanctions against Dadis and his cohort.

One member of the opposition whom Dadis seemed to trust was Jean-Marie Doré, a veteran politician of seventy-one who comes from Forestière, in southeastern Guinea, which is also Dadis’s home region. Before the massacre on September 28th, Dadis asked Doré to persuade the other opposition leaders to call off their rally. But Doré arrived at the stadium too late to relay Dadis’s message. The violence had begun, and Doré was viciously beaten; he said later that the men who assaulted him discussed cutting his throat. He was rescued and led to safety by Tiegboro, the chief of the anti-drug commandos.

Bangoura and his boss, Diallo, had also been at the stadium on September 28th, and Bangoura told me that he had watched as the Red Berets opened fire on people. In the chaos, he and Diallo had been separated from one another, but he had managed to find his way out without being hurt. Diallo had been beaten by the Red Berets, however, and was among those led out of the stadium by Toumba.

Bangoura told me that he suspected Dadis of planning to govern Guinea through terror, and that he had recruited militiamen from Forestière and brought them to Conakry. They were living in a school next door to the house where Dadis’s wife was living, Bangoura said, and they were armed with machetes. He foresaw terrible problems, even if Dadis could somehow be got rid of, because Guinea’s Army would remain. “Guinea is the Army,” Bangoura said. “What must be resolved here is how Guinea will be governed in the future, whether it will be by civilians or will continue to be by the military.”

He said that Guinea’s social compact, as it had existed before the massacre, had come apart. “The situation has completely changed,” he explained. “People are withdrawing their support from the Army, and taxi-drivers don’t pick up soldiers anymore.” I asked Bangoura what he thought about Dadis. “I think he is abnormal,” he said. He thought for a moment, then added, “A crazy man cannot be President, but a President can be crazy.” As Bangoura departed, he called out, “God bless Guinea.”

With international sanctions in effect, and an official United Nations investigation into the September 28th massacre under way, Dadis decided to name his own commission of inquiry. One day during my stay, the commission’s “technical team” of police investigators was sworn in at the country’s high court. The ceremony took place at noon in an old-fashioned courtroom with ceiling fans overhead and, at the front of the room, a naïvely painted Justice, sword in one hand and scales in the other. In the audience were the commission’s jurists: there were eighteen Guineans, two Senegalese, and one Moroccan; two Frenchmen had yet to arrive in Conakry. The police investigators stood up as their names were called, said, “Present,” and made their way to the front of the room. Everyone watched in silence as they were sworn in, as if the performance itself were some kind of justice fulfilled.

I had been invited to meet with the Minister of Justice, Colonel Siba Lohalamou, and he led me from the courtroom into his office, past his receptionist, who was watching cartoons on TV with several other women. When we were seated, he said he felt sure that, despite the initial difficulties, the commission would confirm the government’s assertions that only fifty-eight people had been killed, and that most had not been shot but had been trampled by the panicked crowd. He added that the September 28th incident had begun and ended in ten minutes. As for the allegations of rape, he scoffed, “Can a military man with a gun in his hand rape a woman in ten minutes?” Shaking his head side to side, he smiled and said, “I don’t think so.”

I was keenly aware, with both Dadis and Lohalamou, that I was listening to men who were desperately trying to concoct an alibi. In the days of Latin America’s “dirty wars,” the desaparecidos were invariably accused by their murderers in the military of being off in the mountains, fighting alongside the opposition, and Dadis was using the same technique. The victims were blamed for bringing it on themselves; the “uncontrolled” soldiers had been lured into committing excesses by the opposition. In his telling, the Forces Vives had somehow become transformed into narco-terrorists and members of Al Qaeda.

One opposition leader I talked to, a professor from the University of Conakry, showed me a video clip that he said had been shot on September 28th. On the screen of his cell phone were jerky images of soldiers walking around with guns, while at their feet a group of terrified-looking civilians lay together on the ground. Nearby were bodies lying face down and still. He said, matter-of-factly, that he had seen people shot and stabbed to death in front of him. “Everyone saw,” he said. “It was public.”

Lohalamou had been the director of the École de Gendarmerie for many years. The gendarmerie, he explained, was a force started by the French to “somehow control the Army.” I told Lohalamou that Dadis had said that the Army was “out of control,” and asked him if that was true. “Yes,” he replied smoothly. “We have some well-trained officers who went to some really excellent institutions abroad, but here in the country indiscipline has been the rule. If there was a precondition to holding elections, we would need to talk about the reformation of the Army. You can elect somebody, but the next day the soldiers will be out in the streets shooting their weapons.”

I asked Lohalamou what the punishment would be if Guinean soldiers were found guilty of rapes and murders at the stadium. Was the death penalty applied in Guinea? Lohalamou nodded uneasily and said yes, it was; it was usually carried out by firing squad.

Lohalamou was right about one thing: the soldiers certainly seemed out of control. One afternoon as I was sitting in a government waiting room, a commando came in and put a DVD in the player in the entertainment system. He then removed his holstered pistol and flopped down on a sofa near me. A movie began playing on a large plasma television screen on the wall. The film, “Cannibal Ferox,” by the Italian director Umberto Lenzi, was about the misadventures of several young Americans who go into the Amazon jungle and encounter tribesmen who like to impale people on stakes and eat their body parts. At one point, a slim blond man named Mike captures a young native girl, perhaps twelve years old, and strips off her top. Mike urges a woman named Pat to torture the girl and hands her a knife. Pat, visibly excited, seems about to slice off one of the child’s nipples, then reconsiders. In the end, Mike shoots and kills the girl. Finally, Mike and Pat are caught by the Amazonian cannibals, who torture them slowly until they die.

The commandos came and went, lingering, in some cases, to watch. None of them seemed aware that their choice of entertainment might be seen as inappropriate after they had been accused of participating in a massacre in which women had been sexually tortured and killed.

Drug abuse seemed to be rampant among Guinea’s soldiers; one favored drug was brown-brown, a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder. In Conakry’s diplomatic circles, it was widely speculated that Dadis and Toumba had cocaine habits. Drugs have infiltrated the military and the government throughout the region. In neighboring Guinea-Bissau, the President and the defense chief were assassinated on the same day last year, in what many believe was drug-related violence. And late last week, in a struggle between military factions, soldiers arrested the prime minister and the chief of the armed forces.

In Guinea, the soldiers were unpredictable in their behavior. One night as I left Dadis’s office, two soldiers silently walked right up behind me. When I turned around to face them, they stopped awkwardly and muttered that they had been sent to “look after me.” I didn’t believe them—they seemed drugged—but I thanked them and shook their hands, which were cold and drenched with sweat. I got into my car as quickly as possible, and the soldiers walked off into an alleyway.

Five minutes’ drive from Dadis’s office, Tiegboro runs a barracks for the green-bereted, black-uniformed squadron of anti-drug commandos. Along with Toumba and the Red Berets, Tiegboro and his men had been singled out by Human Rights Watch for their involvement in the September 28th massacre. Tiegboro was Dadis’s closest aide, sitting in on interviews and expanding effusively on Dadis’s explanations.

Tiegboro is a strapping man, perhaps six feet seven inches tall, whose name, in Malinke, the language of the Mandinka people, means “Man Skin.” In his office at the barracks, he began with emphatic expressions of warmth and equanimity but soon worked himself up into a state of anger; by the end of my visit, he was shouting indignantly. Like Dadis and Lohalamou, he blamed the opposition leaders for the massacre and said that he had personally warned them not to hold their demonstration. Even so, he said, he had gone out of his way to rescue some of them. He claimed that agents provocateurs had been hired by anti-government forces to shoot into the crowd.

At that moment, two detainees were brought into the room. One of them was a young man wearing a Presidential-guard uniform, complete with a red beret. He looked terrified and began to weep as Tiegboro told me that he had been arrested wearing the uniform but was not a member of the Presidential guard. He was believed to be one of the alleged stadium shooters. I asked Tiegboro if I could speak to the suspect, who stared at me wide-eyed, crying, but Tiegboro said no, and waved for him to be led out. The other man, in an African print shirt, was ignored, but Tiegboro said afterward that he was a Malian citizen—proof, apparently, of the “foreign plot” that Dadis had spoken of.

“The demonstration on September 28th was actually a coup d’état that failed,” Tiegboro concluded. “Their plan was to go from the stadium to the city center and release the narcos and others from prison, but it didn’t happen, thank God, because Guinea loves God.”

A few days after our first encounter, I met Dadis again. That morning, an excursion we were to have taken together, to Kindia, a city in the interior, had been abruptly cancelled. Late in the day, he summoned me, apologized for the aborted trip, and told me that his intelligence service had learned that his opponents in Kindia had been planning to disrupt the visit with violence. He feared “another September 28th.”

Dadis was wearing a green jumpsuit with military medals and decorations pinned to the breast pockets. He seemed a little unsteady in his movements, but he was in an amiable mood, and told me that he wanted me to get to know him better. He asked me to come and meet his mother. As we walked to the door, he told me that Guinea had been “on the verge of civil war because of ethnic tension . . . but my coming to power has ended that.” A moment later, he added, “We are not out of danger yet.” Outside, night had fallen, and there was a long convoy of vehicles waiting. Dadis got into the driver’s seat of a pickup and told me to sit next to him. A group of Red Berets scrambled into the back, and dozens more ran to climb into the other vehicles.

Dadis’s home was an ornately pillared and porticoed two-story affair, reminiscent of the “New Babylonian” homes favored by Iraq’s nouveaux riches in the latter years of Saddam Hussein’s rule. A crowd of chanting neighbors had already gathered outside. Dadis ignored them and waved me inside, to the living room, where three elderly women were seated on a sofa in front of a huge plasma TV. Dadis disappeared for a moment and then returned, smoking a St. Moritz menthol cigarette. Taking a seat, he introduced me to the oldest-looking woman—his birth mother. He said, “You might be interested to learn that she is one hundred years old.” The other two women, he explained, were his stepmothers, his late father’s other wives. But to him they were all special. “They are all my mothers,” he said grandly.

The crowd outside had got noisier, and I went to see what was going on. There were a couple of hundred young men, children, and women, dancing and chanting praise for Dadis. The soldiers had formed a cordon to hold them back. One of the chants translated as “Those who don’t like Dadis can leave the country.” Another was “Dadis or death.”

After the visit was over, we drove back to Camp Alpha Yaya Diallo, inching through a running, hysterical crowd of Dadis supporters. As he got out of the truck, the Red Berets waiting there scrambled into a hasty honor formation along both sides of the staircase leading to the barracks. Men pushed one another to get into place. One of them blew on a bugle. Dadis walked up the steps, but, instead of going into his office, he told me to follow him, and trotted up some stairs to the floor above. Without knocking, he swung open a door, and, as a roomful of men leaped to their feet, I recognized Konaté, and saw that we had interrupted a meeting. Konaté and his guests seemed alarmed; the look on their faces suggested that their meeting had nothing to do with Dadis. There were several other military men in the room, and two visitors who appeared to be Arabs. As Dadis gestured at me to follow him, the two Arabs filed out, smiling nervously, and vanished down the stairs. After showing me to a seat, Dadis walked around behind Konaté’s desk and sat down in his high-backed chair. Konaté and a couple of other Army officers stood with their backs against the wall, rigidly at attention.

Dadis swung slowly around in Konaté’s chair for a moment. Then, as if I had never previously met Konaté, Dadis introduced us. As we shook hands, Konaté stared fixedly at me, looking very anxious. It was Konaté’s personal vehicle we had borrowed to visit his mother, Dadis informed me, and we were sitting in his office. Dadis smiled. He held up two fingers, put them together. Without looking at Konaté, he said, “We are together, like one—indivisible.”

Three weeks later, Dadis was shot—not by Konaté, as I might have expected, but by Toumba. I left the country without seeing the aide-de-camp; evidently, he had been keeping out of sight, at another Army base, Camp Koundara, during my visit. Toumba seems to have known that he was in serious trouble, and suspected that Dadis would make him take the blame for the massacre. Numerous eyewitnesses had described him to the Human Rights Watch investigators as the commanding officer at the stadium. On November 26th, the U.N.’s official Commission of Inquiry arrived to begin a fact-finding mission, and over the next week conducted interviews with Toumba, Dadis, Tiegboro, and others. Toumba is said to have reacted angrily and stormed out of his interview.

On December 3rd, with the commission still in Conakry, Dadis went to see Toumba at Camp Koundara. The camp, which sits near the shoreline in the administrative center of town, is another dusty compound of squat buildings, hung with Guinean flags. When Dadis arrived, Toumba pushed him to the ground, aimed his pistol, and fired at him three times. The first bullet hit him in the head, and the second glanced off his right shoulder; the third hit and killed a soldier. Moments later, Tiegboro approached in another vehicle, and one of Toumba’s men threw a grenade at it. Tiegboro was wounded by shrapnel, and his driver was killed.

Dadis and Tiegboro were flown to Morocco for emergency medical treatment, and for weeks there was no verifiable news of their condition. Toumba went into hiding, but in mid-December he gave an interview in which he acknowledged shooting Dadis. “I shot him because at a certain point, there was . . . a total betrayal of democracy,” he said. “He tried to blame me for the events of September 28th. I will not turn myself in, because they do not want the truth to be known. They’d prefer to kill me.”

The truth, though, was becoming clear. On December 17th, Human Rights Watch released its full report. Based on hundreds of interviews with victims, eyewitnesses, and some of the soldiers involved, the report accused Dadis of instigating the massacre and then orchestrating its coverup. Soon afterward, the U.N. Commission of Inquiry issued the results of its own investigation, which largely concurred.

Reports coming out of the hospital in Morocco said that the bullet had damaged Dadis’s brain, leaving him with difficulty walking and speaking. On January 12th, he was led from the hospital and onto an airplane by his Moroccan hosts, apparently lured by promises that they would take him home to Conakry. Instead, the plane flew to Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, whose President, Blaise Campaoré, had for some time been acting as a mediator in Guinea’s political disputes. When Dadis realized where he was, he apparently resisted leaving the plane and had to be coaxed off.

He was joined in Ouagadougou by General Konaté, and, after a day of closed-door meetings, the two men signed a document in which Dadis “voluntarily” agreed to stay in Burkina Faso, recovering from his injuries, while Konaté acted as interim President until elections could be scheduled. Konaté, unlike his predecessor, was not eager to hold power. He was in poor health and had been making regular trips to Senegal for medical treatment. A senior Western diplomat told me, “Konaté has advanced liver disease, and is not long for this world.” On January 26th, with the agreement of a council of opposition politicians and civilian leaders, Jean-Marie Doré, the Forestière-born politician, was sworn in as the new Prime Minister, with elections to be held in June. Tiegboro, meanwhile, had recovered from his injuries and returned to Conakry, where the new regime allowed him to keep his job. The military, for now, was still the country’s most powerful force.

A week later, Guinea’s commission of inquiry issued its own report, a last iteration of Dadis’s version of the story. As expected, it concluded that only fifty-eight people had died at the stadium, though it acknowledged that five more people had died later in the hospital. Dadis was cleared of all wrongdoing, and blame for the violence was placed solely on Toumba.

As Doré assumed office and the country began talking about elections, Dadis was said to be spending hours every day on the telephone with his loyalists in Guinea. Apparently, he still hoped to return to Conakry and also, somehow, to power. In March, a photograph circulated that showed Dadis sitting at a bare desk in Ouagadougou in front of a Guinean flag. The scar where Toumba’s bullet had struck him was visible, a long, jagged white line across the top right side of his skull. Dadis’s elbows were on the desktop and his hands were clasped thoughtfully under his chin, but his eyes were dim, and he wore a perplexed expression. ♦

Jon Lee Anderson, a staff writer, began contributing to The New Yorker in 1998.